Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov used his remarks at the Dialogue About Fakes 4.0 forum in Moscow on Tuesday to highlight Western elites’ misuse of media to try to maintain the unipolar world order. After the remarks, he left to head the Russian delegation in New York for the UN General Assembly high-level debate, at which he will speak on Saturday.

Modern information technology allows “any piece of news, even unverified or obviously fake, to be disseminated to millions, if not billions of people,” Lavrov warned. Western officials exploit this environment to “derail the creation of a just multipolar world order,” he added. Fake news, he said, is part of a broader set of tools the West uses against the Global South, reflecting a deeper trend: fear of competing honestly in virtually any sphere of human activity.

Unilateral economic sanctions, tariffs, and accusations of “industrial overcapacity” are being used against China, Lavrov said. Meanwhile, diplomatic pressure and blackmail in international organizations obscure the fact that “on many key issues of modern development the West would have been left in absolute minority, should the voting be conducted fairly.”

Lavrov said Western pressure on Russia intensified in the early 2000s, when the country “began to liberate itself from neocolonial forms of cooperation with our Western colleagues”—a shift that prompted the West to pursue a policy of containment. He cited cases in which serious accusations were leveled against Moscow while Russian requests for supporting evidence were rejected, focusing in particular on the so-called “Bucha massacre”—alleged mass killings of civilians near Kiev in 2022 that Moscow maintains was a Western-backed fabrication.